Article

Advent

Creed

Gaza

3 December 2023

8 min read

The bleak midwinter: why tears could be the best thing for us this season

In a world of devastation, you can share honest feelings of hopelessness - yet not be overcome.

J. S. Averill

J.S. Averill is an American writer and children's educator. She has recently started Substacking.

In front of a collapsed building, a rescuer carries a new born baby by the arms.

The rescue of Afraa Abu Hadiya, Syria, February 2023.

On February 6th 2023, a heavily pregnant Afraa Abu Hadiya, along with her husband and their four children, was awakened in the dark, early hours of the morning by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake violently shaking their apartment building in Syria. Afraa and her husband gathered their children and made for the building’s exit. However, just as they were nearing the door, the building collapsed upon them, crushing the entire family. Afraa, however, seems to have remained conscious for some hours because she did the unthinkable and delivered a baby girl while trapped beneath the rubble. Then, tragically, she died and her baby was left alone buried beneath a building in the middle of winter.

This year we have read too many such stories. In places such as Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, and most recently, Israel and Gaza, thousands of women, men, and children have suffered and died and grieved as a result of natural disasters and armed conflict.

For those of us who live in relative safety, it is difficult even to begin to comprehend such tragedies. Yet despite our advantages, many of us are struggling in our own ways. According to the CDC, between 25 and 30 per cent of adults in the US are currently experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. And it is no secret that mental distress levels have been steadily climbing for years in the UK as well, especially amongst youth.

It can make the joyful, merry, jolly, happy, cheerful, peaceful Christmas spirit encouraged at this time of year strike a discordant note with the actual state of our minds and hearts. All is not well inside many of us, but we sense that Eeyore is an awkward personality to bring into a room, so we tend to conceal the parts of ourselves that are anxious and hurting. I confess I’ve become pretty adept at keeping parts of myself out of sight.

I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world.

I met up with a couple of friends recently. We talked about our children and their school and our plans for Christmas. I said we were going to keep Christmas simple this year. What I didn’t say was that we’ve been keeping Christmas “simple” for several years now. I didn’t say that, a few years after my brother died, my parents and my siblings and I agreed that we would no longer see each other at Christmas because the hole my brother left is too acutely obvious when the rest of us are together. I didn’t say that we don’t keep our Christmas tree up for long because the crystal star we hang near the top is in memory of our son who never saw his first Christmas, and while I love to make him a part of the holiday in this way, I also can’t live with the visual reminder of that pain for long. I didn’t say that although we make an effort to give our children a happy Christmas, my husband and I are just trying to make it through to the other side of the holidays because we’ve twice in recent years painfully and unexpectedly lost our household income right before Christmas and the season now triggers within us the fear and confusion and hurt of those Christmases. I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world. I just told my friends that we were going to keep Christmas simple. Maybe you have your own lines you trot out on such occasions.

If you do, the season of Advent is a welcoming space for such as us. Advent is observed during the four weeks leading up to Christmas and marks the beginning of the Christian church year. Traditionally, it is a time when Christians remember how their spiritual ancestors, the ancient nation of Israel, spent roughly 600 years being conquered and enslaved successively by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome. The God of Israel had, however, promised that he would, one day, send them a deliverer, a “messiah”, to rescue them from their bondage. And so, the Israelite people, in their suffering, waited and looked and prayed for the coming of their deliverer.

Christians believe that Jesus, whose birth is celebrated at Christmas, was that messiah, and that (spoiler warning) he ended up delivering not only Israel, but the whole world in a very different way than anyone was expecting. (But that’s the story of Easter, and we’re not there yet.) During Advent, Christians remember the centuries of Israel’s powerless waiting to be rescued, and how, true to his word, God sent them a messiah.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air.

However, Advent is not just for looking back. It is also a space for acknowledging all the myriad ways in which darkness still rules over us today. How we still suffer and hurt and die. How we inflict these things on each other. How it seems like, no matter how we try to make the world better, it’s still always in a tragic mess. And then, while we’re acknowledging all of that and feeling its great weight, Advent asks us to do something that feels preposterous at times: to believe the promise Jesus made that he will, one day, banish darkness from the earth and make it completely and irreversibly whole and new. In short, we’re asked to continue to wait hopefully for light to break while we live in the darkness.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air. But, in the face of the anguish of Israel and Gaza, and the wounds I’ve experienced in my own life, do I dare live as if everything will come right in the end? I would like to, but when hope ends in disappointment it wounds deeply. I’m not always sure I can afford to risk hope.

If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome.

Advent urges me never to stop calling for help, but if calling for help isn’t exactly the same thing as summoning hope, it’s perilously close. Is it possible to call for help if I don’t believe, if I am afraid to let myself believe any help will arrive?

Well, apparently it is. I learned this from Afraa’s tiny daughter buried in rubble.

After the earthquake, relatives and friends rushed to the ruins of the collapsed apartment building in order to try to rescue those who had been inside. As they dug through the debris, one of them reported hearing “a voice” from beneath the rubble. The rescuers followed the sound and eventually uncovered the baby, still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord. She was pulled from the wreckage of her house and family, and sped to hospital where she miraculously made a recovery and was adopted by her aunt and uncle who gave her her mother’s name.

She was rescued because someone heard her voice. The journalist does not specify what kind of noise she was making, but given that she was injured, suffering from hypothermia, and barely breathing it seems it must have been weak crying or whimpering. And considering that she was surrounded by her dead mother, father, and four siblings, and that the entirety of her short life outside her mother’s body had consisted of the noise, terror, chaos and pain of the building falling upon her, it seems impossible that she was hopefully and consciously calling for help. How could she imagine what help might be? Her mother had not even had the chance to hold her in her arms. What could she know of a tender face, gentle hands, warm blankets, nourishment in her belly, soft fabric against her skin, the healing of wounds? She was not waiting or hoping for any of these. She did not even know they existed. She was simply weeping for the terror and pain and loneliness of her little life. But the weeping was enough to save her.

As I consider tears, it seems to me that they can, in themselves, be reason for hope. The person who weeps has accepted neither that things are the way they should be (as do those who cooperate with or advance the destructive forces in the world), nor that things are the way they must be (as do those who, however understandably, give up and surrender themselves to being destroyed). If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome. In fact, unless we grasp how grievous our wounds are, how can we begin to seek out the right physician? How will we choose to make the changes within our power to make? A world that is lamenting its own brokenness, as Advent encourages it to do, seems to me to be a world for which there is yet hope.

I have never experienced the trauma of a building collapsing upon me, but I’ve spent plenty of time trapped beneath the twin wreckages of a life I once had and the one I was hoping to build. Maybe you’re buried in rubble too. Maybe you’ve survived an earthquake and its aftershocks, but you’re not sure you’re glad you have because you’re bleeding and crushed and in the dark and you can’t imagine how you will rebuild and survive in such a world even if you do eventually emerge. Maybe you’re not even sure you want to be rescued because it’s all, all broken now – your home, your family, your bones.

This Advent I am trying to gather the strength to call for help for myself and for the world although my heart and my faith are bruised. Maybe you will call too. But if we are too afraid and confused and wounded to do even that, then let us weep, friend, together in this darkness. For although this is a world in which much breaks and dies, it is also one in which rescue has been known to arrive unlooked and unhoped for. And if the memory and the promise of Advent hold any truth, sometimes the hand outstretched unexpectedly to deliver turns out to be, beyond all imagining, the hand of God.

Article

Comment

Justice

20 February 2025

7 min read

Just where does the arc of history bend towards today?

What happens when the optimism bubble bursts.

Roger Standing

Roger is a Baptist minister, author and Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon’s College in London.

The feet and legs of someone walking on a white rug, beside the words Justice and Government woven in to it,

Obama's Oval Office rug.

The White House, via Wikimedia Commons.

"Yes we can!

Yes we can!

Yes we can!"

There was something magical about hearing Barak Obama speak to a crowd. The rhythm of his sentences, the rhyme of his words and the melodic cadence of his baritone delivery had the ability to hold you spellbound. It felt so positive, so uplifting, so inspiring.

The call and response with the audience only underlined the positivity of the impression: ‘Yes we can!’

It was listening to Obama that I first heard the quote:

‘The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.’

I loved it. Obama used it a lot, and so did I.

It seemed to epitomise the hopefulness his presidency embodied. Implicitly, it advocated the qualities of patience and persistence that are so important in working for a better world. It doesn’t happen overnight. It also acknowledged his rootedness in what had gone before, ‘As Dr King used to remind us …’. Obama was borrowing the line from one of his own heroes.

In fact, the quote was with him all the time in the Oval Office of the White House, to the right of his desk. Along with four other quotes it was woven into the perimeter of a 23 by 30-foot oval rug that almost filled the room.

The one-liner still delivers a punch, just as it did for Martin Luther King. However, I am increasingly convinced that it doesn’t stand scrutiny. As much as I want it to be true, and long for it to be true, I do not believe that it is.

The sentiment was of its time. Not the 1950s and 60s of Dr King, but the 1850s of the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker from Massachusetts. The germ of an idea originated with him in a sermon entitled, ‘Of Justice and the Conscience’. At this point it was a complicated paragraph rather than a pithy one-liner.

‘You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.’

Parker was also responsible for ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ that Abraham Lincoln would go on to cut and paste into his famous Gettysburg Address during the Civil War. It also appeared on Obama’s rug.

The intellectual circles of the 1850s were alive with many new ideas like progress, equality and the abolition of slavery, and ‘transmutation’ (or evolution as it would become known). In science, industry and social life things were moving forward and getting ever better.

As the century moved on this conviction continued to grow and become more widespread. By the early years of the twentieth century Parker’s thought itself had been distilled down into the single line we’re familiar with and included in popularly published collections of aphorisms.

Prosperity and progress informed the narrative of Western culture and ideas of evolution were imported into other disciplines. In anthropology, for example, this gave rise to ‘social evolutionism’ and the categorisation of societies into a developmental sequence ranging from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’.

Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that there was a darker side to such notions. Here was also an underpinning for a colonial worldview and an intellectual justification for racial hierarchy. Western culture was more ‘evolved’.

These views were epitomised in psychology where, for example, in Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) he speaks of indigenous people as ‘the most backward and miserable of savages’, comparing the way they live with features of a neurosis and mental disorder.

The carnage of the First World War effectively popped the bubble of an overly optimistic ‘progressivism’. I do wonder whether we are now at another ‘bubble popping’ moment in the West.

Is your ‘bubble of optimism’ in danger of popping, or has it even popped already, like mine?

In the decades since the Second World War we have succumbed to our own narrative of progress. We have witnessed amazing technological advances and stunning scientific discoveries. The forward movement is obvious, and the promise of an even better future is clear.

Then, supported and monetised by the market economy, our lives are tempted, enhanced and festooned by the latest products and services that our money can buy. From smart doorbells to wearable tech and TikTok to ChatGPT our world is constantly changing and upgrading and the movement forward is undeniable.

The narrative runs in our wider life too. We celebrate the triumph of the suffragettes, the defeat of fascism and the collapse of old-school communism. Francis Fukuyama may have been premature declaring the end of the Cold War as the ‘end of history’ in 1989, but it did seem like Western-style liberal democracy was what the world was striving for.

Then there are the advances in our shared life together in Britain. If Acts of Parliament in some measure illustrate the pulse of the nation, the direction is clear. Take, for example:

the Sexual Offences Act 1967
the Sex Discrimination Act 1975
the Race Relations Act 1976
the Childrens’ Acts of 1986 and 2004
the Disability Discrimination Act 1995
the Human Rights Act 1998
the statutory instruments protecting against discrimination in employment on grounds of religion or belief (2003), sexual orientation (2003) and age (2006)
the Gender Recognition Act 2004
the Equality Act 2010
the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013

This list isn’t exhaustive and there are campaigners who are very keen to add to it. But we live inside this narrative, and we know the plot. It is familiar to us. And it would be so easy to be seduced into a new myth of inevitable progress, ‘The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice’.

‘Social evolutionism’ was so deeply embedded in late Victorian culture that its ‘self-evident’ truth went largely unchallenged. The vast majority believed their own hyperbole and complacently embraced the fruits of burgeoning industry and an expanding empire. They lacked the self-critical capacity to comprehend the flaws in their worldview and to understand what their world was capable of in the infernal, apocalyptic catastrophe that was unleashed in 1914.

Maybe, embracing a more contemporary myth of progress has a similar effect on us. We presume that our way of life will inevitably continue moving forward unchallenged. That we have a right to experience a tomorrow that will always be better than yesterday. And that those who do not subscribe to our notion of ‘progress’ are clearly inferior, ill-informed or backward in some way. But such a mindset also lacks a culturally self-aware and critical edge and is oblivious to how easily things could fall apart.

At this moment in time the world seems far less secure than at any point in my lifetime. Our community hosts refugees from Ukraine and Hong Kong, a friend has only recently returned from working with a voluntary agency in Israel and I am about to meet up with another friend who has just flown in from the United States.

Populist, anti-democratic and disruptive forces are more blatantly at work around the world than for many a long year. Developments in AI, cyber-terrorism and digital warfare create a disembodied sense of ‘existential threat’. And then there is the climate crisis. Fires in California, floods in Europe and the unprecedented sequence of six tropical cyclones in the Philippines in late 2024 seem to have had little impact in accelerating the response to global warming.

Is your ‘bubble of optimism’ in danger of popping, or has it even popped already, like mine?

Of late I have found helpful insight in observations made by Jesus. Rather than fixating about what might happen in the future, he encouraged those who had attached themselves to him to live in the moment,

'Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.'

For those who were concerned about what might be happening and felt the world was falling in around them, he offered reassurance. He counselled that such events did not signal the end of the world. Rather, this was simply the kind of thing that happened.

'You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen … these are the beginning of birth pains.'

Rather, the early Christian ethic was rooted in God’s loving, supporting and strengthening presence during unstable times.

Writing to the Christian community that had formed itself in Rome, the apostle Paul was convinced that whatever befell them – trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, or weaponised violence – that nothing would be able to ‘separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’

And right at the base of this ethic that Jesus advocated was an unswerving commitment to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’

Which takes us back to Obama’s rug and the West Wing office.

On the left-hand side of his desk was a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt:

'The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.'

And that really is it. History may not bend towards justice, and hard-won progress we’ve achieved can likewise be lost, but our future will always hang on the ‘welfare of all of us.’

Well said Mr. President!

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